New Sentences: From ‘The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington’

“Since his youth, Mr. Gregory was bothered by a fly that used to enter his mouth when he spoke, and when somebody spoke to him, the fly would fly out of his ear.”

From “Mr. Gregory’s Fly,” in “The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington” (Dorothy, a publishing project, 2017, Page 189). Carrington, who died in 2011 at age 94, was born in England but lived much of her life in Mexico.

Leonora Carrington kept a pet eagle, planted a tree in the center of her house and was once reportedly rescued from a mental asylum by a nanny in a submarine. She cooked her houseguests omelets that included their own hair, which she had secretly snipped off their heads while they slept the previous night. She was, in other words, a card-carrying Surrealist: spelunker of the oozy chasm between the rational and the absurd.

Some of Carrington’s ooziest explorations were wild little fables — microstories in which wolf-men talk to plants and naughty children sculpt living camels out of sand.

This sentence, from a long-unpublished story, presents us with the perfect Surrealist fly: a sentient speck of deranged logic. Imagine being tormented by something as inexplicable as a personal lifelong bug, and not one that simply buzzes around you in a constant cloud of chaos but one that follows a rigorous pattern: It goes in when you speak and exits when you are spoken to. It’s like a computer program gone wrong, a stray bit of binary code — one, zero, one, zero, one, zero — simultaneously irrational and rulebound. The language of the sentence is equally precise and silly, culminating with the wonderful phrase ‘‘fly would fly’’ — as if it would do anything else.

Mr. Gregory, who has a large black mustache also named Mr. Gregory, seeks medical attention for his problem, but as you might imagine, it goes poorly, and he ends up worse off than he started: ‘‘The fly had totally disappeared, but Mr. Gregory had become navy blue with red zip fasteners over his orifices.’’ Sometimes it is best to accept the absurdities we already know.